


Amiable Tenacity

by zeteram



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, also osiris is a terrible friend, because ikora needs more friends, osiris and praedyth get discussed but are not in this, praedyth totally met saint in the corridors of time, when the servers are down i write fic i guess, yeah i said praedyth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 13:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeteram/pseuds/zeteram
Summary: At first Ikora resents Saint-14 for being alive when Cayde is dead, but it's hard to stay mad at someone so relentlessly cheerful who cares about the same cranky old man she does.
Relationships: Saint-14 & Ikora Rey
Comments: 8
Kudos: 60





	Amiable Tenacity

**Author's Note:**

> This sat half-finished for a while, until I got bored because the D2 servers were down. I still like the first part best, but I didn't think it stood on its own very well.

“I suppose I should be thanking you,” Ikora said, looking away from Saint-14 to one of her bookshelves. In anyone else’s home, this would be considered a library; Saint knew for her it was a receiving room, and that all the rooms had books. It was doubly impressive given how Tower North had been destroyed in the Red War, and no doubt a fair amount of her collection with it.

“Why is that?” he asked. “Because my Brother is responding to his mail in a more timely fashion?” She closed her eyes and placed her fingers on her temple, enough of an acknowledgment. “He is checking it more often, I think.”

“You’re not the only one who wants to talk to him,” she said snappishly. Unperturbed, he nodded, and she seemed to hesitate at that.

“He does not ignore you, Ikora. He has been alone for a very long time.” Osiris had changed in the time Saint-14 had been gone, and in his opinion it was much for the better. Somewhere along the way, he’d learned that asking for help wasn’t a personal failing.

It would have been better if he’d learned that a few centuries earlier, but then, Osiris was a very stubborn man.

“ _You_ were alone for a very long time,” she said coolly, but he could tell she was simmering with anger under the surface. Some people looked at Ikora and saw only the image she presented, of a calm and controlled Warlock who thought before she acted in all things. Some people weren’t as intimately familiar with the Void as Saint. “That didn’t stop you from coming to visit me after a few days of being back in the world.”

“I am sorry it took me so long,” he said gravely. “Everything is changed, and I thought to myself, surely Ikora is too busy for an old man she hardly knew.” He saw her expression crack just a little into a smile, and Saint relaxed into the comfortable chair she’d offered him.

“Funny,” she mused, “Eva Levante was just telling me about this nice _young_ man she’d just met. How you convinced her of that is beyond me, when you were here before half the walls.”

Saint puffed up, proud. “It is because I look forward, which is a trait of the young. I am honored to have her regard. She understands.”

Ikora bit her lip, eyes sad again. “I thought it was frivolous, at first. Should we really celebrate the Dawning after the Red War? We lost so much--”

Saint was nodding. “--and that is _why_ it was important. Yes?” It was something he believed strongly - that a laugh or a song was its own way of fighting the Darkness, that the end goal of fighting would be to put down their weapons, and that celebrating life in the face of adversity was the best thing about Humanity.

“I’m still trying to learn that,” Ikora admitted. “But she was right, even if I did have to tell her I didn’t know what kind of cookies you would like.”

Saint laughed, delighted. “You did not tell her I would have been happy to eat even those burnt grenade launcher cookies the Cryptarch takes?”

Her gaze softened again, almost as if she were trying to uphold some kind of anger against him but was having a difficult time. He’d sensed it, the hurt behind her eyes; it was why he’d waited a few days to seek her out, in truth. Better to give her time to sort it out on her own for a while, but--he had missed her, even if he’d mostly only known her as Osiris’s student.

“I did tell her to avoid that ridiculous Radiolarian Pudding Asher likes,” she admitted, and he snorted softly. “I thought you might have had enough.”

“I am done with the Vex,” he agreed quietly. “I will not seek them out. If they bring the fight to me, that is a different story.”

She walked over to where he was sitting and laid a hand on his shoulder, which he squeezed gratefully. “That would be why you’re not going to Mercury to bother Osiris in person?”

He exhaled; there it was, the source of her hurt. Osiris was so much like one of his own riddles it was almost comical: opaque to the point of frustration, difficult to pin down, endlessly fascinating, and prone to causing distress. The only real saving grace was that he never meant to cause harm, even when his pride caused people to hurt anyway. “No. I looked for him, and he did not want me to find him. Eventually, I stopped looking.” Saint frowned, looking for words to encompass decades and centuries of being in a place that was not real, chasing a man who did not want to be found though worlds that had never existed and futures that would not come to pass. “No--that is not quite right. I stopped looking for Osiris. I always kept fighting to get back to the City. I believed it would still be here. That it would grow, and change, and become a place I had always dreamed it would be.”

He smiled up at her, knowing she could read his posture just fine while he was in armor. “And it did. The Vanguard has done well; I am proud of you, Ikora.” Zavala, too, of course, and his Guardian friend, and Shaxx and Saladin and everyone else who had had a hand in building the City of his dreams, but Ikora was the one he was talking to now.

And the one who probably needed to hear it most.

Ikora’s grip tightened briefly, and then she whirled around to face away from him again, and he could see her arms crossing. “ _You’re_ proud of me,” she stated, and that undercurrent of crackling emotion sent enough of a jolt through him that Saint-14 knew he'd been right, stood up, and embraced her in a comforting hug.

He half expected her to break away, but instead she clung to him. How many people, he wondered, would give Ikora Rey, Warlock Vanguard, a hug when she felt like she needed one?

At least one. Probably more than that, if she would let them.

“Osiris is, too,” Saint said gently. “But he has a fat head and he will not admit that he has emotions.” She gave a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “When he finally decides he is ready to talk and comes here, I will drag him to you and make him tell you himself.” He let her go with a pat on the back, and Ikora nodded and sniffed, looking at once better and worse.

“And he might actually return to see you,” she mused, looking more composed already. “Between the two of us, I would say he does not take his exile as seriously as he could.”

It was Saint’s turn to cross his arms. “He will come. He makes the excuse he is busy; keep sending him your Guardians for the Sundial. It worked for the Undying Mind, and that was _much_ better at manipulating timelines. It will work for the Psions.” He could see her forming a question, like _how did you know about the Undying Mind_ , so he preemptively cut her off. He knew entirely too much about the Vex and wasn’t interested in explaining how. “I am done being the Unstoppable Force for my Brother. Is my turn to be the Immovable Object.”

Ikora smiled at him, and it was a real smile this time. “The funny thing is, when you say that? I actually believe it.” He tilted his head in a question, so she continued. “I do know from personal experience how stubborn Warlocks can be. _Especially_ that one.”

Saint chuckled. “But in two hundred and fifty years, no one has broken the record for Thickest Skull set long ago by Saint-14?”

“They never will.”

“Ah, it is good to be back.”

“...It’s good to have you back.”

\----

“Ikora!” Saint-14 waved to the Warlock Vanguard (it was still hard not to think of her as the _new_ Warlock Vanguard, but he was trying). A couple of pigeons hopped away, cooing, as Ikora approached. He could tell she was masking some strong emotion, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

She paused a few feet away from him, arms crossed, standing conspicuously close to one of those candle piles that Osiris’s weird cult kept putting everywhere. “Saint, are you responsible for this?”

A couple of the hangar workers scooted out of the way, because sometimes when Ikora looked like that there would be a Void Bomb following soon after.

“That depends,” Saint said, crossing his arms and standing to his full height in return. “What are you talking about this time?” He’d cleared the Obelisk in the Courtyard with her and Zavala, and he’d gotten permission for Osiris’s iconography around his ship, and...he couldn’t really think of anything else. Ikora wouldn’t care if he’d played a prank on Shaxx, surely? Because the man deserved it, everybody knew that.

“I received,” she said in a chilly voice, “a Dawning greeting.” He tilted his head. “From Osiris.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. That one was an easy question. “Yes. I am responsible for that.”

“ _How_?” she asked, sounding exasperated. He could sympathize. That was exactly how he felt about Osiris most of the time. “This is a letter where he not only admits he has emotions, but he actually tells me what they are! I barely receive status updates from him on my most important inquiries!”

“And you are still getting those, yes?”

She scowled. “More than before.”

He gestured for Ikora to come sit on the Gray Pigeon with him, now that he knew she wasn’t going to start a fight. She came over, looking a bit deflated. “I think, since the Infinite Mind was destroyed, you have sent him some letters? He does not respond with anything you have not asked. He never asks how you are doing, or remembers holidays.”

“Holidays, yes. He sent me a gift last year as well. And he does remember the Festival of the Lost,” she admitted quietly. “We--came to an agreement about sending Guardians into the darker parts of the Infinite Forest for that.”

Saint-14 was silent for a moment. He’d been to the ‘Haunted’ Forest, of course. He’d been stuck there for a while, trying to branch his way out again, fighting terrible constructs time and time again. And much later, after the Martyr Mind had been destroyed, he’d sensed unfamiliar Light there. The first time, he’d followed it back to the source, but the date hadn’t been quite right yet to prevent another paradox.

The second time, he’d followed it out once the timestamp ticked over to the Savior Guardian’s native frame.

Osiris had arranged for that. He'd thought Saint was dead, and he'd still left a breadcrumb trail.

“Saint?”

He shook his head to clear it. “If he remembers holidays he is better than he was. What I mean to say is that Osiris is very bad at remembering other people need things like updates on his personal life. He is bad at remembering _he_ needs things like _having_ a personal life. And you, you have the Vanguard to run. You cannot spend all of your time nagging your old teacher to remember to feed his heart.”

She made a hum of assent, looking thoughtful. “But?”

“I have nothing but free time now,” he said, sounding very satisfied even to his own ears. “And he feels guilty, so he reads all my letters instead of ignoring them like he used to, once upon a time. So I tell him, the City is beautiful during the Dawning. Ikora makes the decorations, and the faces of the people when they look at them are full of joy. And I send him one of those little greetings from Tess Everis.”

That little smile he remembered was back, though with a slight echo of a different pain. “As subtle as a Titan, Cayde used to say.”

“Pah. Subtlety is what you Warlocks are for. Sometimes a man needs a punch to the face to see what is right in front of him.”

“I would pay a great deal of Glimmer to see that,” she muttered almost too quietly for him to hear. He tapped her shoulder in the lightest of Titan punches, and she smiled sheepishly at him. It was a good smile, and it warmed him to see it.

“Now,” Saint said in a mock-serious tone. “I have a question for you, Ikora Rey.” She looked at him curiously.

“Have you sent _him_ anything yet?”

Ikora yelped in a most undignified fashion and stood up quickly. “I keep forgetting to wrap it! I’m doing that now.”

Saint waved to her as she ran off, laughing to himself.

\----

“--and I said, it cannot be me! I am here! But I was still concerned, because I have been too close to the paradox limit before.”

Ikora tilted her head, so Saint paused his story to explain. “The Light, it shields us from paradox. It is a paradox to have a body that was dead and is alive, yes? Or to grasp the Void, which is a concept without substance - this is another thing that should not be. We can withstand this because of what we are as Guardians. But just as I cannot hold a Ward forever without it breaking, there can only be so much paradox within us at one time.”

“Praedyth,” Ikora whispered, and Saint nodded. Ikora was one of the smartest people he knew, so he wasn’t surprised she’d made that connection.

“There were times when my path drew close to the Corridors of Time, and there I found signs of a Warlock who was not Osiris. We never spoke directly, but I learned from Praedyth that we each have a limit, and he had exceeded his and so was barred from this timeline. It is why I did not return with the Guardian after the Martyr Mind, but waited until after he had entered the Corridors in this timeline to exit the Forest.”

“It meant you wouldn’t have to change your own personal timeline,” she mused, and he nodded. As far as the rest of the timeline had been concerned, whether Saint-14 lived or died in the Infinite Forest would change nothing until he left (which meant apparently Osiris would have made the Sundial anyway, which was an interesting thought). “Would you mind sharing with me?”

“Oh! Yes, of course. Geppetto?” His Ghost bobbed an affirmative and transmitted the collection of information he had about Praedyth and the Vault of Glass over to Ophiuchus. He wondered if the Vex ever figured out how to make Atheon stop falling off the pit ledge. It was just like them, to put someone who could not levitate over an endless pit like that. Following the pattern without interrogating it, or trying to change the situation entirely like a Guardian would.

“Thank you. But, ah, you were saying, about your old weapon?”

“Yes! So the Guardian, he goes to see that skulking crime lord you call the Spider--”

\----

It was late at night the next time Ikora asked to meet with him, but Saint-14 had been awake anyway, sitting on the far edge of the City’s walls and looking up at the stars. The Traveler’s glow made the view of the night sky incomplete, but it was still more than he had ever seen in the Forest; even when they’d been simulated, he’d known the difference. To have real starlight in his field of vision again was almost as satisfying as feeling the Light of other Guardians and hearing the laughter of the City’s people as they went about their lives.

“I apologize for the hour,” she said as soon as he’d warped back and made his way to her little library-slash-receiving room. “I didn’t realize how late it was until I saw the timestamp on my message.”

“Is all right,” he said, shrugging and taking the seat he preferred (he suspected it was also Zavala’s favorite chair, because it was clearly meant to accommodate Titan armor rather than Warlock robes). “Sleep does not always come easily to us.”

Ikora inclined her head in agreement, but she stood at the window looking out rather than at him, hands clasped behind her back. Saint was starting to recognize is at her _I have something serious to say_ position, because unlike some people, he had now seen her be less than serious a few times.

Finally she spoke. “When you first returned to the Tower, I resented you. I think you know that.” Saint said nothing; he’d sensed it, but countered it with kindness, and now she obviously felt guilty. “Why should Osiris break time to bring you back, when there were so many others we’d lost? Cayde--”

Ikora took a breath, and Saint could see her fingers clutching at the windowframe hard enough to leave marks. “--Cayde was my friend. I won’t say my only friend, but he was the only one who was my friend without all the baggage and complexity of power dynamics and superiority. I cannot be on equal footing with the other Warlocks; I am their leader.” She made a gesture which Saint correctly interpreted as _or they’re Osiris_ , which was enough of a complexity in itself. “Zavala is a good man, but he has no time for me. Cayde always did. I’ll give you, that’s because he was always dodging responsibility, but--”

“--but you miss him,” Saint finished for her, and she looked back at him and nodded, jaw clenched. “And you think, it is not fair that your mentor lost his friend and he came back, and your friend cannot. Even if you did the same thing he did.”

Ikora nodded again and wiped at her eyes. “First of all, I wouldn’t have built the Sundial; it was irresponsible, and he’s holding the entire system together with--with duct tape and string, and I hate that he’s succeeding at it as much as I need for him to succeed at it.” Saint barked a quick laugh at that, despite the seriousness of this all, and it got Ikora to sniff and smile a little. Peak Osiris, really. “But also because of what you said to me about the limits of paradox. I looked at your data from Praedyth and I can’t find fault with it.”

“Ah,” said Saint, finally understanding what she was getting at. “Because Cayde’s return would change too much for too many people.” Also, from what he understood, there was an Ahamkara involved, and that only made things messier than they needed to be. Nasty creatures.

Saint-14’s return had obviously meant a great deal to him and to Osiris, but the rest of the City had only known him as lost. They hadn’t staged an elaborate web of revenge and justice, or brought down a great power of the Darkness in their grief, or haunted every Hunter’s steps for the past year with the specter of defeat and betrayal. There was too much difference between Cayde never having died and the way things were now to consider it a viable course of action, even for a desperate Warlock.

Ikora grieved, but she wasn’t as desperate as Osiris. She could live with it and learn from it, rather than breaking.

“I am sorry,” he said gravely, and she replied with a quiet thanks. “I know I should not be alive.” She looked like she wanted to protest, so he barrelled on. “I cannot change that I am here and Cayde is not. All I can do is honor the sacrifice of those we have lost and try to make up for it because they cannot.”

Ikora walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not all you can do.” He looked up at her curiously. “You’ve--been a friend to me, Saint. I wanted to hate you for something that wasn’t your fault. Instead, I can talk to you like I never talked to anyone but Cayde before. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Easy enough,” he said, but it was in a gentle voice rather than boasting. “I was Vanguard; I know what you do for the Vanguard and you do not have to defend it to me. I have lost Hunter Vanguard friends, although I will say I was not as close to them as you and Cayde-6 were.” He still missed Tallulah, though. She was such a bright beacon to the other Hunters. “Also, I care as much about that cranky old man as you do, so you do not have to defend him to me, either.” She laughed lightly, and he knew he was right about that, too. It was hard to love someone that most other people knew of as a myth and a rumor rather than a frustrating friend wholly dedicated to fighting the Darkness. “That leaves me with just Ikora, and I like Ikora. So, she is my friend.”

She smiled fondly at him, though he could still see evidence of her grief for Cayde in her eyes. “And I think I know now why Osiris would risk everything to have you back. I’m sorry I couldn’t see it before. You’re my friend, too, Saint.”

He gave her another hug before he left, because he was definitely allowed to do that now, and went back to looking at the stars.


End file.
